The Fact-to-Film

By Richard Zoglin

One week after the bloody federal assault on cult leader David Koresh's fortress in Waco, Texas, Hollywood came calling at the Bethesda Boys Ranch in Mounds, Oklahoma. A set man from Patchett Kaufman Entertainment, a TV production company, drove by to scout out the 160-acre ranch as a possible location. Three days later, a deal was struck, and last week workmen were at the ranch constructing a replica of Koresh's peach-colored compound. Soon federal agents will be surrounding the fortress again, staging another ill- fated assault, retreating once more for a long waiting game -- this time for the TV-movie cameras.

The networks' frenetic pursuit of movies-of-the-week based on real-life news events has ascended into the surrealistic stratosphere. The Koresh saga wasn't ^ even over before its TV-movie doppelganger began taking shape on a movie set 300 miles away. Casting is under way (Timothy Daly of Wings will play Koresh), shooting could begin in as little as two weeks, and NBC hopes to have the finished film on the air in May. If the real-life standoff is still going on, Koresh may even be able to watch it from his fortress to see how the story comes out.

Blame it on Amy Fisher. The tabloids' favorite teen temptress was the subject of three network movies in December and January. Critics hooted in derision, but the networks had the last laugh: ratings for all three ranged from good to great. Since then, the scramble to turn sensational news events into juicy TV drama has gone into overdrive. In May, along with the Waco cult story, NBC has announced plans to air a movie based on the World Trade Center bombing -- less than three months after the disaster.

As the time lag shrinks, the money being paid for these stories mounts. Jim and Jennifer Stolpa, who were rescued in January with their infant son after eight days in a Nevada snowstorm, met with producers while still recovering in a hospital from the partial amputation of their feet. They got a reported $650,000 to tell their story for a CBS movie.

The drill has become depressingly routine. A news story hits the evening news or one of the TV tabloid shows; then the agents and producers descend. Sometimes there is a bidding war to lock up the rights for the participants' stories. Other times, the public record -- press accounts or court transcripts -- will suffice. The point is to get something on screen fast, while the story is fresh in viewers' minds.

Madelon Rosenfeld, a former criminal lawyer now working as an independent producer in New York City, was on the phone to Wilshire Court Productions in Los Angeles just hours after the World Trade Center bombing. Her proposal: How about a TV movie based on the heroic deeds performed by everyday folks caught in the disaster? On Saturday, one day after the explosion, she started meeting with people: two Brooklyn teachers whose kindergarten students were caught in the blast; a telephone repairman who set up a triage area for the injured; a mechanic who led six people to safety from the bowels of the towers. "They were on it real quick," says Fred Ferby, the mechanic. "She had everything together. She gave me something in my hand I could have a lawyer look at." Within three days, NBC executives gave Wilshire Court the go-ahead, and the | race was on.

The life-to-TV transformation doesn't always work so smoothly. The five lost skiers who were dramatically rescued near Aspen, Colorado, in late February had what seemed like the ideal TV-movie story. Rob Dubin, one of the last skiers found, returned home after his rescue to find 50 phone messages from the media (reporters as well as movie producers). The next day there were balloons, flowers and 35 proposals shipped by overnight mail. A week later, to make their formal pitches, three of the most serious bidders came to the hospital where Dubin's wife and a companion, Brigitte Schluger, were recuperating.

The Dubins and one other skier have signed with the William Morris talent agency, which has had talks with a dozen production companies interested in the story. Though all the skiers have agreed to use the money to pay leftover medical bills and rescue costs before dividing it, some in the group are grumbling that the proposed film will focus too much on the Dubins. Schluger has publicly complained that the Dubins treated her like a "little Roman slave girl" during their ordeal and has retained her own lawyer. Says Ken Torp, the group's leader: "I wouldn't wish this aftermath on my worst enemy."

At least the Aspen story, if it makes it to the screen, will have breathtaking Rocky Mountain vistas. The story of Katie Beers, the Long Island, New York, girl who was kidnapped and kept in a dungeon for 16 days, might seem a bit tougher to turn into an uplifting TV experience. But that hasn't stopped producers from contacting Katie's mother (who has been accused by the county of neglecting the child) and the man charged with the crime (who will most probably plead insanity). Katie herself is being shielded from the onslaught by attorney Donald Novick, appointed to be temporary guardian of her property rights. He is currently weighing four offers to buy Katie's story.

In this climate, Koresh and his band of religious zealots are being terribly uncooperative: they stubbornly refuse to step aside so TV can get on with the business of dramatizing their story. NBC's May quickie, a segment of its In the Line of Duty movie series, will doubtless not be TV's last word on the affair. One producer has reportedly paid $75,000 for the rights to Koresh's mother's story. Two Waco Tribune-Herald reporters, whose expose of the cult set the stage for the current siege, have hired a lawyer to sift through their TV-movie offers. Agents salivating for Koresh's own story have badgered his ! former attorney, Gary Coker, for help. When nothing materialized, one producer inquired about doing a movie on Coker.

Is there a frenzy going on? Without a doubt," says Rob Lee, a senior vice president at William Morris, which has packaged many of these docudramas. "It's been brought on to a great extent by the shows dealing with sensational true-crime stories like Hard Copy and Inside Edition." The networks are attracted to these stories because they are easy to promote: viewers are already presold on the story. Not that this always translates into big audiences. Though many ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, like ABC's Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story, have been ratings hits, other major stories, like the Oakland fire and the San Francisco earthquake, have fizzled in their network-movie incarnations.

Participants in the fact-to-film free-for-all are having qualms even as they continue to play the game. "Frankly I'm just worn out," says Judd Parkin, ABC's senior vice president for movies and mini-series. "There's a point where you have to sit back and examine whether the returns are truly worth the amount of energy and the expenditure of money." Since the networks pay a low, relatively fixed amount for TV movies (usually about $2.75 million), shelling out mid-six-figure amounts on rights fees is an extravagance that producers can ill afford.

Then, oh yes, there's the ethical matter of paying these sums to people who are accused or even convicted of crimes. (Many states have laws that forbid such payments to indicted or convicted criminals, though after New York's Son of Sam law was declared unconstitutional, the validity of such laws has been in question.) A number of producers and network executives say they deplore the practice, and some are showing signs of restraint. ABC's Parkin says the network refused to negotiate for Amy Fisher's own story, opting instead for a film based on public records, and mercifully no network has unveiled a first- person account of Jeffrey Dahmer's grisly murder spree. At least not yet.

Can the networks go any farther? A docudrama daydream: it's 1996 and the networks each maintain a rapid-deployment TV-movie squad. It springs into action the minute a news event reaches A Current Affair or the front page of USA Today. No lengthy preproduction, no complicated rights negotiations. Each day's events are simply re-enacted as they happen. Instant docudrama -- a new segment every night, just after the evening news.

Better yet, instead of the evening news. Then all the feds would have to do is move from Waco to the Oklahoma movie set and negotiate with Koresh's stand- in.

With reporting by Joni H. Blackman/Denver, Georgia Harbison, William Tynan/New York and Richard Woodbury/Waco